Hey everyone, im having an issue that that popped up a few days ago. this is a pretty long story so i hope i dont make you tired 
It began when i was driving a RGB LED strip, which is just one RGB LED with a light pipe. that came from a photocopier. At the moment i was running w8 as my laptops OS. the current driver for the arduino was a modem driver. It worked so i didnt bother changing it to the actual arduino driver, why fix something that isnt broken, right? Anyway i had signed up for the free 1 year windows 10 trial (my laptop is currently 3 years old so i would get a new one before this time was up). So the night i was messing around with the strip everything was fine uploading. It was pretty late and my upgrade to windows 10 was ready so i went to bed with the upgrade doing its thing. I was still curious over the strip so i began to do some more testing when I woke up. So i started up my computer and after poking around my new OS (windows 10) for about 10 minutes, I started up the IDE, plugged the UNO in, changed some code, and uploaded... sort of, not really at all. the only thing that happened, was the error "Serial port 'COM4' already in use. Try quiting any programs that may be using it". i poked around my computer for the culprit, i do alot of computer work to, so i know my way around. Nothing. i opened device manager and well i forgot to check this first. so i thought there would be no issues, just make the arduino impersonate a modem again. nope not this time, windows 10 doesnt have the option. so i was forced to mess around with the actual drivers. i installed the arduino driver in the arduinos driver folder and still no progress.
So now on to the IDE and the UNO board itself. i did the trick where you take the atmega328 out and bridge the RX and TX pins together and try typing to it through the monitor. nothing same error when i try open the monitor. so not the actual micro. i put the micro back in and and did some more searching online. nothing of importance but i did see that disabling and re-enabling the port helps. i did that and i manage to start the upload and the boards TX and RX light stayed almost solid, which shouldnt happen, they should flicker. then i got the error "Ser_Send: no info avail" or something very similar. Then i kept getting the first error and second error. then i tried updating firmware on the atmega even though i ruled it out. nope wont even do that error can't open device "\.\COM4": Access is denied. what the heck? i have never seen that error message out my 3 years working with these things.
now at this point im at loss, i have no idea what to do. the pin 13 status LED flashes when i try to upload indicating the auto reset has happened and that the code is coming in but it never pulls through. it only does this sometimes and only on the first attempt after closing and opening the IDE. after that, i get the first error i talked about.
so far i tried multiple times:
changing the com port
uninstalling the driver and then reinstalling
disabled and re-enabling the port
i have already got a ISP pocket programmer, and couple of AtTiny85s, because i have only worked with AVRs, and i enjoy them, and i intend on sticking with them. so i think im going to stray away from arduinos because they're just to fragile for me. someone literally made a complete list on how to destroy these boards. i already have about 5-6 years of programming experience so learning a new programming language wont be an issue.
i really just want to know if i somehow fried the atmega (i doubt it because the pin 13 LED flashes when powered up) or if the FTDI chip is dead. i think its a software issue on my computer though. most likely a driver issue.
if you made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read. ANY help would be greatly appreciated 